Midnight Special

Monday, July 19, 2010

Ten books. Only ten. No, this is good. I'm overwhelmed with books and getting down to ten would be good. Maybe if I get down to only ten lists of ten things, I would be in good shape. One of them could be ten ways to find books. There are four to start in the assignment, and a bunch of others on top of that. I wonder if Nancy Pearl has ever appeared on Letterman?

10. Google Books9. WorldCat8. LibraryThing or Goodreads7. Amazon or Barnes&Noble6. Blogs devoted to genres and book reviews5. Professional Committees and their work (such as ALSC's annual notable books for kids)4. Databases like Novelist or About:Books. (You'll need a library card number for these)3. Books or magazines or journals about books2. Recommendations from friends1. Books I've been meaning to read anyhow

Trying out the social sites, I found browsing to be a little cornering because I could only alter or narrow the search one subject term at a time. For instance, Goodreads' Explore->Books let me select "children" but then listed all the results within that. Entering "children's fantasy" and selecting genre had me scrolling past all the Harry Potter, being surprised by the inclusion of Slaughter House Five, and basically ending up with a long list that didn't seem very browseable.

The Zeitgeist tab in LibraryThing showed an array of tag assortments: authors, genres: miscellaneous tags, reviewers, people with the most books, and so on. Starting with these unusual categories gave me chance to happen upon something by sheer popularity, accessing collections or books that have most been selected by others. Without a particular subject in mind this proved to be an interesting approach.

Google Books and Amazon are both places where searching seems yield closer results to what I am intending to find that then either Goodreads or LibraryThing were able to produce, but that is their strength. Goodreads and LT seem to have arranged their site according to users and what they are doing and promoting, rather than the actual books themselves, which seems to be Google Books and Amazon's interest.

The interconnectedness of the sites, being able to find a book on Amazon from Librar Thing, or finding a book in a library on the Google Books page, makes me think that there will be less and less undiscovered information, a visible component of the One Machine.

With all this technology abounding and so nimbly guiding me through the digital world, I feel very capable and able to access a lot of information. But as useful as these systems are, I still feel like they are very contrived, designed to meet my anticipated needs. Where is the whimsy and nonsense? Where is the inexplicable? Where is the coincidence? I decided to make my list concerning those who embrace the wild and unseen quality of things. That's right, I'm talking about wizards:

Saturday, July 10, 2010

It seems that current scholarly research on library architecture is mainly focused on digital libraries. There is certainly good reason for that, but the absence of papers about planning and construction of physical spaces strikes me as odd. I had to modify my search from "library architecture" to include "-digital" to even get results. From this list, not many of the articles were cited more than the requisite five times. A lot of the articles were from a long time ago, the 60s, 70s, and 80s, so they probably would not be as helpful to someone searching for the current trends. By clicking on the link to the articles which cited the ones found in the search, I found a few topically relevant articles but these had not been cited yet by others. Clicking on the related articles link gave more of that type of result. Changing the search terms to phrases like "library construction" and especially "public library design" was the best method for finding current, relevant and cited results.

Compared to the Library Literature database, the Google Scholar results were more spread out in subject, and also in format. Google Scholar pointed me to articles, citations and, distinct from the Kent databases, books. These books actually seemed to be more often cited than articles but are probably not as easily retrieved. Some results were, partially, in Google Books, so there was some immediate access, but since Google Books only shows up twenty percent of published books you only get a glimpse of the item. In terms of format, the Kent database certainly made it easier to collect the results I wanted, just by clicking on the "add to folder" boxes next to the listings. Google Scholar did not have this option.

nih.gov [PDF]A Fry, S Adams - Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 1957 - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
S INCE the start of the BULLETIN in 1911 there have been 18 articles and five fairly important
news notes published related to library planning and/or architecture. The news notes,
chronologically, mention the new University of Michigan General Library (1); the second ...Cited by 6 - Related articles - All 5 versions

X Guodong - The Journal of The Library Science In China, 2001 - en.cnki.com.cn
...LibraryArchitecture in China in the 1990s. Xia Guodong. In the 1990s, more and larger new librarybuildings were built in China. In this paper, the author analyzes their characteristics in design
and functions. 1 tab. 8 refs. 【Key Words】： Libraryarchitecture in China. 1990s. ...Cited by 5 - Related articles - Cached

DE Thompson - The Journal of Library History, 1969 - JSTOR
Page 1. A History of LibraryArchitecture: A Bibliographical Essay ... Much has been written about
libraryarchitecture but there is little in print on its history. There are no sources in which a com
plete history of libraryarchitecture, either as a whole or by type of library, is presented. ...Cited by 5 - Related articles

RE Ellsworth - The Library Quarterly, 1955 - JSTOR
Architects, too, now live by a new conception of their work. "Form fol- lows function," now a tiresome
cliche' really did represent a new spirit in architecture in the 1920's and 1930's and today. The
best of the architects did begin in that period to follow the principle that beauty was ...Cited by 5 - Related articles - All 2 versions

W Hai-qing - Journal of Lanzhou College of Petrochemical …, 2002 - en.cnki.com.cn
Combining state conditions with requirement of information age, based on the culture , art ,
flexibility,ecology and multifunction of libraryarchitecture as well as the modern tendency of libraryand infiltration of humanism,the paper discusses the new tendency of college library...Cited by 4 - Related articles - Cached

[CITATION] Carnegie libraries: their history and impact on American public library development

[CITATION] Planning library buildings: A select bibliography

SM Foote - portal: Libraries and the Academy, 2004 - muse.jhu.edu
... These designs still do not address issues that arise when a subset of the patron population wishes
to come together to work collaboratively ... A glance at the New York PublicLibrary Reading Room
in figure 3 will confirm this phenomenon in which readers' turf is vigorously ...Cited by 7 - Related articles - All 3 versions

DE Campbell, TM Shlechter - The Library Quarterly, 1979 - JSTOR
... The third method involved direct observation of all public areas of the library to produce detailed ...in different library locations, and satisfaction with different aspects of the total library system ... It
was concluded that the physical design may influence student behavior and satisfaction ...Cited by 19 - Related articles - All 4 versions

WW Sannwald - 2009 - books.google.com
... Chicago 2009 Page 3. William W. Sannwald was assistant to the city manager and
manager of librarydesign and development from 1997 to 2004, and was city librarian
of the San Diego PublicLibrary from 1979 to 1997. He is ...Cited by 23 - Related articles - Library Search - All 8 versions

CR Brown - 2002 - books.google.com
While extensive effort has gone into ensuring the reliability of information appearing in this
book, the publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, on the accuracy or relia- bility of the
information, and does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any person for any ...Cited by 13 - Related articles - All 5 versions

A McDonald - Advances in librarianship, 2000 - emeraldinsight.com
At the close of the 20th century new library buildings continue to be con- structed all over the
world with increasingly imaginative and varied designs. This is despite some almost reckless
predictions about the end of libraries and their book collections, due to the rapid growth in ...Cited by 9 - Related articles - BL Direct - All 3 versions

Sunday, July 4, 2010

It was very hard to find articles relating to the physical construction of a library. Cited articles about information architecture abound. Digital libraries building principles are very much being analyzed and written about, but physical spaces do not seem to garner as much attention. I had intended to explore physical spaces, but results relating to digital library architecture were much more prevalent. Even articles that were thorough enough, on topic enough and old enough to be considered relevant information were not cited. For instance:

Just like this last example, plenty of Library Literature articles were not found in the Citation Index. Another problem in dealing with the results was the inability to filter out article written in different languages.

Because I think a large part of this assignment is to compare the results of searching in academic, highly controlled spaces where the ability to 'tag' requires writing a whole paper to more loosely associative situation with Google Scholar, I chose to eschew the minimum citation requirement in creating my bibliography.

As a last note, I would be happy to be wrong about this. If anyone is able to do a search on this topic and find the articles in ISI, please post a comment with your method.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

I had not used the Library of Congress website reference or information before this assignment, but I had been to the site. It is so dense with collections and tools that it took me a little while to get my bearings. At the top, there is a button linking to Library Catalogs. What kind of Library is so huge that it needs multiple catalogs? It seems like there are catalogs built for different collections, like the SONIC collection of sounds, the picture and print collection, the regular print holdings of course, and then a catalog of Library Catalogs! It gets overwhelming.

On the left are some of the search options including 'browse by subject'. If you use this, you can find photographs by LC subject headings, which I found really interesting. Cataloging pictures with the standard subject headings would allow them to be found in a search that might otherwise just find print materials. It also helped quickly answer my doubt as to whether "Identity" would find many pictures or not. It was not one of the main subject heading, but I decided to return to the main page and search by keyword anyway. This gave me 76 results, but most of them there identity cards, issued by a government. Others were about confirming identity. Still others were included precisely because their "identity is unknown". There were only a few that presented some sense of self. I used the LOC site to keyword search for 'identity' in the subject headings, but got no results. I finally settled on 'self-expression', but when I searched for that in the picture collections I found one self portrait.

More than a few of the pictures were not available in sizes larger than thumbnails. There were links leading to information about obtaining originals and copies, but I was interested to read that "The Library of Congress generally does not own rights to material in its collections and, therefore, cannot grant or deny permission to publish or otherwise distribute the material."

There is clearly a difference between the type of collections in the Library of Congress and Flickr. I put the search term "african american men and music" into both, and in each case got about a dozen results (I might not have quite the right terms because that seems like a small number to me). The difference in the results seemed to lie in the time periods represented. While both had images of well dressed men playing guitar and kazoos, only Flickr had men on stage with microphones and sunglasses. I can see how this relates to the Generator's View of the World and the Generator's anticipation of the User's Needs. The Library of Congress has a particular view of what information it wants to save and rightly so, there is too much out there to catalog everything. Instead, it seems like it has settled on a niche of information relating to the historical social character of America. Just to test this, I looked up the names of some modern rappers. Here's what came up:

Black Aleck Dickinson and his dog Snoop.

Monday, June 28, 2010

One of the properties of Flickr that I really like is that there are sometimes subtle variations on the information provided, and because storage is not as much of an issue as it may be in some other archives, they are all accessible. For instance, a search for a famous building that many people have visited might yield pictures from all angles, at all times of day, giving a much more complete view than the 'just enough' information that an encyclopedia might provide.

Having done a few searches to feel out what kinds of photos I was likely to run into, I decided to turn my subject in a different direction. I wanted to explore Flickr, but also photography itself as a way to encode information. To do this, I typed in some search terms for abstract nouns like loneliness. I typed in 'self-esteem' and found that the results were about many of the various ways of interpreting the term. Some were frustratingly literal, like the picture of an iphone playing "self-esteem" by Offspring. Then there were pictures of people exploring their levels of self-esteem through writing or quotes combined with images. All in all, I found that the results, though peppered with whimsy and kitty-cats, were getting me down a bit so I switched gears.

When I searched for "identity" I got some very interesting results but they were much to wide open, similar to the previous search. I realized I needed to clarify my search. I was looking for photos of people that communicated a sense of self, something that in someway gave the sense of self-definition. This was very different than the photos that explored the question of identity or were about corporate branding. As a side note, I did find this interesting comment attached to a photo: " I got a formspring today from someone telling me they had found a blog of somebody impersonating me. I've had people use photos without permission before, but this took it to a whole new level. There is literally somebody pretending to be me while stealing my photos and posting them on their blog."

In terms of searching for information, I think I bit off a little too much for this assignment since the search results could probably not be replicated because my decision to include a photo in the folio or not rested largely on my "I'll know it when I see it" approach. I tried looking at the tags from the photos whose inclusion was the most certain, but other tags were mostly literal tags that objectively described the photo, like 'shoes', 'beach' or what kind of camera was used. I needed to rely on the descriptions and comments to determine the context, so I could include the photos that stated an identity, rather than just the concept of identity. After considering my results, and seeing how dependent they were on their context, it seems like I was doing more of a 'knowledge search' than and 'information search'.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Take a look at this unbelievable series made by the Mississippi public broadcasting station in 1985 (the year Marty McFly also went Back To The Future). In 2123, humanity is being driven to extinction by smog and a race of aliens called the Wipers, whose function in life is to disrupt communication and destroy stored information! Humans decide to evacuate earth. In this incredible first part of the first episode, a team of human information specialists, led by Ms. Bookheart, are securing the sum of human knowledge against the Wiper onslaught and, hopefully, for someone in the future to find.

Here is the first part of the second episode which features the Users, a technologically advanced race, that discovers the store of human knowledge and how they come to investigate it.

This prompts a few thoughts:1. The historical perspective information storage and retrieval is amazing. Part of what is interesting is that the human librarians are using a computer for teaching or making lists or something, but not storage and retrieval. This makes sense when you see the Users, who are hip to retrieving information via computers.

2. I love the wonder and disbelief of the Users when they come across the book, a static mode of information storage. More than that, I love Aphos' haughty scorn at such primitive item. And more than that, I love when he is blindly groping at the concept of fiction to the point where he is confused about why mice can no longer speak.

3. It's kind of fun to imagine what we would to if we did have to leave Earth, or at least store all of the information we can currently access. The information on the internet is stored in computers in probably hundreds of thousands of places, and the access to that is governed by yet more computers. I know there are websites like archive.com, but how do you backup the One Machine?

Thursday, June 24, 2010

From the very beginning of my information search, using the online services seemed to have a much smaller focus than when I was doing the searching. Asking someone else put me into a mindset of being more concise in what I was asking and more accepting of answers. I think this has a lot to do with my internal thought process, the way I sort through possibilities and combinations, and understanding that this query is relatively open ended.

The Know It Now service was relatively fast and responsive. The conversation lasted 35 minutes and yielded 10 links to information, all of which I thought would be helpful. The librarian gave me information in a mix of other people to contact, like travel agents, independent sources, and some commentary, possibly their own experience. Some of my information needs were anticipated or interpreted by the librarian. For instance, I asked about staying in New Zealand, and the librarian sent me information about the cost of living. I got a sense that this conversation ended with a thorough search with all of my questions, at least the ones I have right now, are answered.

Ask a Librarian lasted for about 25 minutes and gave me only 2 links. This conversation was more brief and gave me less information. The librarian did not keep track of what had been asked and answered. For instance, the librarian asked me if I wanted to know how to find flight information, which I said I did, but then they did not follow up with that. I think the online environments suffer from lack of emphasis and the all too easy drifting between topics that results from different pacing and typing over each other. On the other hand, the librarian could have asked if all my questions had been answered the way the Know it Now librarian did.

Know It Now answered my question better than Ask a Librarian, at least for now. KIN gave me more information to use in helping me accomplish my goal. Maybe when I start using the information I got, I'll find that more isn't necessarily better. Since I've already done the search myself, and have been thinking about what kind of information I need, I'm already in the second step of searching. If I were coming at this cold and without a sense of personal impression, they might seem both services gave me equal access. One point I thought was particularly interesting is the question of home stay families. KIN took my question and gave me two different websites to try, but with the admonition of making sure it was safe. AAL gave me the same warning, but without a specific way to investigate the safety. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I had not given the first thought to whether home stays were safe or not, so even these anecdotal pieces of information were helpful to me.Know It Know 24x7Guest

What do I need to do in order to get to and stay in New Zealand for 3-6 months?23:14:59

ad.valerie2Hello. You've connected to your 24x7 onlinereference service staffed by librarians across the state. Please wait one moment while I take a look at your question.23:15:24

ad.valerie2It sounds like contacting a travel agent would be the way to go here.23:15:56

ad.valerie2You could book your own flight and research things yourself, but it may be best to ask a professional.23:16:23

ad.valerie2I can point you in the direction of some government sites on obtaining a passport, etc.23:17:07

ad.valerie2You may want to check with your local library directly on that one. Local scholarships are the best bet because you're more likely to get one, and they just aren't advertised online.23:43:26

ad.valerie2Nationwide competitons, in other words, are easier to find online but very difficult to obtain.23:44:37

GuestOK, I'll check at my library then.23:45:42

ad.valerie2Is there anything else you need tonight?23:47:28

GuestNo, thanks for answering all these questions. There's a lot of parts to this and what you found will help me get started.23:47:41

GuestCan I get a transcript of this?23:48:20

ad.valerie2Is your email <emailaddress withheld>?23:49:11

GuestYes23:49:51

ad.valerie2Then yes. Check with KSU's Study Abroad office or your advisor about scholarships, too. In addition to the library at both KSU and Cleveland Heights public.23:50:00

ad.valerie2Good luck!23:51:09

GuestThanks. Goodbye!23:51:12

ad.valerie2Thanks for using our service. Come back again if you need help with another question.

Ask a Librarianmeeboguest681756: Hi. I would like to know how to get to and stay in New Zealand for 3-6 months

imaksulibrarian: you want to know how to find flights and a place to stay?

imaksulibrarian: there is a lso a link on there on how to apply for the visa

imaksulibrarian: as for finding a place to stay, that would depend on the area you wish to visit and a simple google search would probably be best for that. did you want to stay in a hotel? Hostel?

meeboguest681756: I would like to stay with a host family if possible

imaksulibrarian: is this a trip you are planning yourself or are you going with an organization r group?

meeboguest681756: I'm planning it myself. My plan is to take a class while I'm there, and then stay after the class ends.

imaksulibrarian: most times host families are set up through an exchange program through schools. you may want to contact the school where you will be taking classes to see if they have arrangements they can suggest.

imaksulibrarian: i have found a few sites that have people on there willing to do :host family stays" but you run the risk of not knowing if these people from some of the sites are who they say they are or safe.

imaksulibrarian: i would try and get in contact with the school to see if they have suggestions and if they know families they can vouch for